Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Subcontinental plagiarism

After long time I read a very high standard literary article from a Pakistani newspaper. (In last few years, most of Pakistani journalism has eroded to nothing but junk). Taking clue from Fareed Zakaria's recent confession of plagiarism, author reviewed plagiarism in Urdu literature! And it is a very fine read..."Who hasn’t read Ismat Chughtai’s short stories and novels and fallen for her? Anyone who has read Lihaaf or Til or Masooma or Ziddi is fond of her. The latter, which was also made into a film, is an almost plagiarised version of a Turkish writer’s novel, Hajira. The Turkish author, who wrote by the pseudonym of Adalat Khanam, penned Hajira in English in the late 19th century. After prominent historian Amir Ali highly appreciated the book in his presidential address at the Calcutta Mohammedan Educational Conference in 1897, it was translated into Urdu in 1899. Some 43 years later, Chughtai came out with her novella, Ziddi. She changed the Turkish, Muslim names into Hindu names and turned the comedy into a tragedy. Most of the plot, dialogue and setting remain the same;..."Read full article: Subcontinental plagiarism:Idrees BakhtiarURL: http://dawn.com/2012/08/14/subcontinental-plagiarism/

2 comments:

beyond
said...

i read by chance a 1975 readers digest which i found in a second hand shop in islamabad.few days later,i was listening to late ashfaq ahmad in one of his famous talk show.a complete article was taken out of the RD anout graciousness of heart.i was so really surprised.

Note

To protect privacy of people - names, places, and in many instances genders, time periods and ethnicity of characters in stories have been changed. But I have tried to keep theme and actual events as close to true events as possible.